Apple AirPods 4 review: Fan favorite

While Apple isn't one to stray too far from a winning formula, the company's latest set of entry-level true wireless earbuds feel like a significant step up on its previous one. Now in their fourth incarnation, the Apple AirPods have inherited so much of what made the older AirPods Pro worth upselling yourself on that the tables are beginning to turn.

For the first time, you can get noise cancelling in Apple's cheapest set of true wireless earbuds. There's a few catches to that selling point, but the reality is as good as it sounds.

In Australia, the new Apple AirPods 4 have a recommended retail price of $219. That's just the baseline though. You will have to shell out $279 if you want the model with noise-cancelling. 

In the past, one of the biggest selling points for the standard AirPods is the amount of money you're saving compared to the likes of the AirPods Pro or AirPods Max and that's still the case here. If you fancy saving even more money, be sure to check out the table below for a round-up of Australian pricing and deals for the new Apple AirPods 4.

This year's entry-level AirPods have more in common with their Pro-grade counterparts than ever before. You don't get silicon ear-tips, but you do get a more compact design with squeezable touch controls and a smaller case with a built-in speaker that plays nice with Apple's Find My app.

The updated earbuds also come with a USB-C port as standard plus support for Spatial Audio and wireless charging. For the first time, there's even active noise cancellation. There's just one catch. It costs extra.

The fourth-generation AirPods come in two types, each of which varies in features  and pricing. If you're keen to save a little bit of cash, you can do so by forgoing noise cancellation. It's an interesting choice to offer consumers but I think most people are going err in the other direction. Even if you are paying more, you aren't looking at a cent on top of what would have had to pay for the third-generation AirPods.

Nowadays, more and more of the competition facing the standard AirPods has noise-cancellation, so it's a no-brainer that Apple has included it here. Even if you don't pay the premium though, you'll probably come away relatively impressed with what the H2 chip adds to the equation for Apple's most affordable set of AirPods.

It might not have active noise cancellation but even the standard AirPods 4 comes with support for spatial audio, voice isolation and gesture controls. I can't say it's likely to supplant the physical interface as a shortcut for me but being able to answer a call by nodding your head injects new novelty into the experience you expect.

Otherwise, the setup for these AirPods is identical to every other. The new AirPods integrate across your various iOS and MacOS devices just as seamlessly as the old ones did. The AirPods 4 are a smidge heavier than their predecessors. Fortunately, that's somewhat offset by the slightly smaller case and proper IPX4 rating for water and dust resistance.

The haptic controls are another highlight. The fit is not. Your mileage may vary but while I had a perfectly fine time wearing the AirPods 4 sitting at my desk, they'd fall loose from my ears as soon as I started moving around. Wearing them to the gym quickly became more trouble than it was worth. Obviously, everyone's ears are shaped differently but without the ability to make the fit better via interchangeable ear-tips, it felt pretty frustrating to deal with.

Another small change I don't love here is the replacement of a physical pairing button with a haptic based one. I guess I can see the appeal in the idea of reinforcing the minimalist aesthetic but having a real button had tangible benefits and this alternative is measurably worse in that you can now no longer force your earbuds into pairing mode if the charging case runs out of battery.

Still, for the most part, Apple has struck a good balance here between standing firm on the things that people like about AirPods while adding extra value in ways that take a bite out of the list of reasons to pay the premium associated with the AirPods Pro.

When it comes to battery life, the Apple AirPods 3 came in with 6 hours per charge and another 30 hours in the case. The AirPods 4 are powered by a new H2 processor, which brings with it both improved sound quality and support for things like Spatial Audio. However, these new tricks do some at something of a cost of battery life performance.

The AirPods 4 deliver just 5 hours of playback (or 4 hours of noise-cancelled playback) on a single charge. It's not quite a deal-breaker but it's definitely a downgrade. It's a similar story with the lack of silicon tips. Absent a proper seal within your ear canal, it's hardly a surprise that the noise-cancelling here isn't as good as what you'll get from the AirPods Pro.

Despite that limitation, the new AirPods 4 still do a decent job of delivering more than servicable results. Used at home or out and about, the affordable earbuds cut down on noise and offered a superb sound stage for music, audiobooks and podcasts alike.

Put to the test with a playlist designed to tease out the limits and strengths of the hardware inside each earbud, we actually found the results fairly comparable to the likes of the AirPods Pro.

Run through this gauntlet, we struggled to find a situation where the new AirPods Pro fell short. The noise cancelling is better on the AirPods Pro but these earbuds managed to score almost top marks across the board when it came to sound quality. Bar Childish Gambino's "3005" every test track we threw at the earbuds met the moment and delivered the goods.

As for the microphone on the AirPods 4, Apple's budget-friendlier earbuds overdeliver. Used for voice calls and video conferencing, the sound quality wasn't as detailed as something more high-end might be but it was a definite step above the average set of budget earbuds. It's hard to pin down how much of this is down any magic being done by the H2 processor and how much of it is just having microphones that are pointing the right direction. Even if they aren't quite exceptional, the hardware here is decent enough to get the job done.

If you're unwilling to entertain the idea of earbuds that come from outside of the Apple ecosystem and can't afford to throw down the cash on the likes of the AirPods Pro or AirPods Max, the fourth-generation AirPods are going to sound pretty good in more ways than one.

The gains when it comes to sound quality and design might be relatively small but the impact that active-noise cancellation has on the overall value proposition is as hard to ignore as the numerous design improvements.

The biggest advantage that the AirPods 4 have is still the price-tag but it's no longer the only one.